Death Studies

Como un jeroglífico con múltiples significaciones entreveradas, el libro se despliega como una breve pero sutil y contundente disección de un momento crucial en la emergencia de un nuevo paradigma de interpretación de la realidad de raíz forense, con un enorme potencial transformador, que nos obliga a replantear profundamente los perímetros de experiencia humana, y a repensar drásticamente los espejos en los que nos reflejamos.

An article about Anders Nilsen's work, Don't Go Where I Can't Follow, in the context of grief theory and the literature of grief. The article can be found in the edited collection, Pathographics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), and it was edited by Susan Merrill Squier and Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff.

This article examines how 'safety case' experts working on Finland’s nuclear waste repository project at Olkiluoto summoned, conjured, or channeled memories of Seppo—a deceased colleague whose ‘specter,’ as some put it, still ‘haunts’ their scientific community. For some, Seppo’s postmortem presence manifested as gaps in knowledge left behind by an expert often reluctant to document the methodological assumptions underlying his knowledge-practices. For others, it manifested as anecdotes about Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity as well as his more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. Still others caught themselves asking ‘What Would Seppo Do?’ while troubleshooting at work. Inspired by anthropological and philosophical work on ancestors and haunting, the article unpacks how the multi-millennial time horizons of nuclear waste risk, the intergenerational time horizons of expert succession, and the everyday time horizons of a single expert life-course shared entwined fates. It focuses less on what knowledge disappeared when an expert’s body died – or how it could have been preventatively backed-up or managed – and more on what has lived on of the expert in and through surviving colleagues. Analysis of 'afterlives of expertise' like these can, it concludes, provide insights for a current moment of intergenerational transition in nuclear energy sectors in Europe, North America, and beyond.

(An english version follows) Dans cet article, je traite de la difficulté de se savoir mortel. Je pars de la caractérisation de la mort comme « pur point d’interrogation » (Levinas) pour montrer que la position épistémique qu’elle implique est intenable pour les êtres de langage que nous sommes. Je défends l’idée selon laquelle notre rapport discursif à la mort est strictement de l’ordre du commentaire, au sens large comme au sens savant du terme. Autrement dit, là où il est impossible de vérifier, d’observer, de mesurer et, en même temps, de se taire, il reste à commenter, à épiloguer.


IN ENGLISH :
In this paper, I address the difficulty of understanding one’s own mortality. I begin by examining the characterization of death as a “pure question mark” (Levinas) to show that the epistemic position that this implies is untenable for the beings of language that we are. I defend the idea that our discursive relationship to death is strictly limited to commentary, both in the broad sense and the scholarly sense of the word. Stated otherwise, that which is impossible to verify, to observe and to measure, but is also impossible to remain silent about, can only be commented upon, discussed indefinitely.

What would it mean to take zombies seriously? Cultural savants have noted the rise of the zombie in American popular culture in the twenty-first century. And many scholars have found the zombie useful as a lumbering, empty-headed metaphor that could signify just about anything. The zombie might look like a loved ovne, but their flesh is rotting and their individualism has tragically withered away. Before I came to zombology, I was already fascinated by an American obsession with preventing the decay of the corpse through an exceptional devotion to embalming. I argue that the intersection of the new zombie-ism, the rapid decline of embalming, and the mass trauma of 9/11 is significant. Playing with zombies along a spectrum from fright to humor allows Americans to work through not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of being. The cult of individualism no longer needs a perfect biological body.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

This thesis uses Continuing Bonds Theory to reinterpret kispum, an ancient Mesopotamian family funerary practice, in a new way. Traditional scholarship has portrayed the purpose of the ritual as apotropaic, and that the family dead are feared as hostile ghosts. This study suggests that profound beliefs about life and death in Mesopotamia, and interactions between the family and deceased loved ones can be found in the material and textual evidence. A new perspective focusing on evidence from the second millennium BC in ancient Mesopotamia is used to investigate the kispum ritual using ideas from the archaeology of emotion and Death and Dying studies. Current understandings based on textual based studies and the varied traditions of archaeological investigation are introduced in Chapter 2. Then, using notions of continued bonds, new insights are explored to better understand the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. In Chapters 3 through 6 textual sources and archaeological evidence are assessed against this background, and against each other, with attempts to correlate textual with archaeological details. In the context of ancient Mesopotamia, this thesis employs new approaches to mortuary archaeology to provide new insights suggesting ways that conventional methods may be enhanced. Finally, this study also brings us back to an archaeology of death which is interested in attitudes toward the dead.
http://hdl.handle.net/2381/29251

Carved cadaver monuments are a specific form of Transi art produced during the late Medieval, and thus Roman Catholic, era in much of Northern Europe. These recumbent Memento Mori tombs are regularly described in terms of rotting cadavers or putrefying corpses however, it was not necessarily an aspect of their initial creation that the English carved cadavers were displayed in putrefaction. As can be seen here, the carved body is not rotting, but rather resembles an emaciated person very recently deceased, laid naked inside an open burial shroud or winding cloth. The now anonymous cadaver from Feniton in Devon is in remarkably good condition; a damaged nose is not unusual given he has survived the iconoclasms of the Reformation, and the Civil War, as well as the heavy-handed Victorian restructuring of churches. Like all the English monuments in this style, he was a specific individual, a named member of the social elite, and we can be sure of this because these monuments were hugely expensive; the equivalent cost today would be in the region of a top of the range luxury sportscar! Like all of these monuments, he protects his modesty with a carefully positioned hand, and he has his mouth and eyes open (some have their eyes half open or slited open, but none appear to have closed eyes and therefore are not imaged sleeping); in many ways he looks like a fresh corpse. Keying marks for gesso are evident on the shroud cloth; these texture marks fixed a very thin plaster layer to cover the stone, and the gesso plaster was then painted, although very little evidence of this remains of this. The paint was fixed onto the gesso with organic substances like egg white, and as this decomposed, the paint would have fallen off; few extant examples retain much evidence of polychroming but a conserved example, that of John Baret, a wealthy merchant from Bury St. Edmunds, found evidence of flesh coloured tones on the body, with red and green veining. Baret commissioned his sculpture whilst he was alive; it is mentioned in his will of 1463, and he was not alone in this – several wealthy individuals commissioned during their lifetime, a life sized effigy of them naked and emaciated, lying in their open burial shroud. But why? Why would someone of social status with civic or indeed clerical, standing, as another such individual was Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, chose to have their wasted self, exposed to public gaze? I argue that a potent mix of vernacular theology, and Roman Catholic belief in purgatory, help us answer this question.

Questo lavoro si propone di analizzare il fenomeno crematorio dalle sue origini. Nato a Milano nel 1876 si sviluppa in Europa con esiti diversificati nei vari paesi europei e negli andamenti delle singole città. Si esaminerà il caso delle maggiori realtà europee e delle città italiane dove il fenomeno ha maggiori riscontri.
Si tratta di una ricerca mixed metod. La parte quantitativa costruisce un database generale dei paesi europei con popolazione, morti, cremati e crematori dal 1876 al 2014. La parte bibliografica sistema fonti internazionali e fonti nazionali come quelle della Fondazione Ariodante Fabbretti di Torino rendendo i dati meno storici e più sociologici. Non manca una parte etnografica con sopralluoghi in Danimarca, Olanda, Germania, Spagna, Milano e Livorno con appendici fotografiche sulle realtà più significative per la nostra ricerca.
Questo lavoro ricostruisce un inedito ed esaustivo database delle cremazioni divise per paese europeo dal 1876 al 2014. Tra i risultati risulta che il maggior numero di cremati si ha in città libere e città imperiali libere che favoriscono l’insediamento di nuove popolazioni e cultura liberale, altresì il fenomeno attecchisce laddove il mutuo soccorso e la propensione a meccanismi previdenziali è più diffuso (civicness).Sul piano teorico si comparano i diversi esiti tra ebraismo e cristianesimo (protestanti, cattolici, evangelici, ortodossi, per il caso italiano si terrà conto di diverse problematiche inerenti la Massoneria, il Fascismo e i movimenti sovversivi della prima metà del Novecento.
I dati quantitativi sono ricostruiti dai database dell’Enciclopedia della Cremazione di Davies e Mates, della Società per la Cremazione della Gran Bretagna su dati demografici dell’ONU e dell’ Eurostat dal 1876 per arrivare al 2014.
Sul piano qualitativo, questo lavoro ha preso in esame anche diversi sopralluoghi da me compiuti in città italiane ed europee (Milano, Livorno, Pisa, Bologna, Cava de’Tirreni (SA), Amsterdam, Amburgo,  Barcellona, Copenhagen, Francoforte, Madrid, Toledo, Siviglia). I casi più interessanti al fine della nostra ricerca rientrano tra queste pagine con una nostra documentazione fotografica.
A parte casi come Milano e Livorno, molte delle città toccate non hanno una valenza in termini assoluti sulle cremazioni, ma ci aiutano a capire le differenze in termini di organizzazione cimiteriale da paese a paese, frutto di secoli di differenziali di welfare, attitudini religiose e posizione geografica.
Nel capitolo 1 tratteremo la differenza sostanziale tra le narrazioni delle due civiltà religiose esistenti in Europa: Cristianesimo ed Ebraismo e come, nel tempo l’urbanizzazione ne modifichi l’apporto con il fiorire nell’Ottocento di pratiche come la medicalizzazione, l’individualizzazione e l’ascesa della borghesia.
Sarà questa la base della letteratura teorica della nostra ricerca con fonti come Ariès e Vovelle oltre ad una nutrita letteratura sociologica fiorita in un corpus di opere di Antonio Cavicchia Scalamonti e i suoi collaboratori presso l’Università Federico II di Napoli.
Tratteremo in particolare della diversità di approccio dell’atteggiamento ebraico e di quello cristiano.
Tracceremo le tappe fondamentali del cambiamento dei costumi che portano alla costruzione di cimiteri e alle sepolture individuali, una storia in cui la cremazione non è che l’ultimo anello di un processo di mutamento ancora in corso. Quanto alla desacralizzazione problematizzeremo se essa è davvero un processo di laicizzazione o qualcosa di diverso. Non mancheranno gli aspetti organizzativi e commerciali come quello delle pompe funebri.
Nel capitolo 2 per tanto tratteremo un’analisi dei casi europei
le città che hanno ereditato lo status di porti franchi e città libere che si configurano come avanzate sulla pratica della cremazione visto il loro mélange
la cremazione sarà molto attiva in quelle città dove c’è propensione alla finanza e all’analisi del rischio dove cioè è più sviluppato il senso delle assicurazioni private in forma di previdenza che porteranno ad uno sviluppo altresì di previdenza funeraria e di autotassazione per la creazione di Società Crematorie che saranno più propense ad esistere in città dove grado di coscienza civica è maggiore
Tracceremo poi schede analitiche sui primi paesi che giungono a creare associazioni pro-cremazione e apertura di crematori dal 1876 al 1930.
Soprattutto nel caso dell’Italia, esaminato nel capitolo 3, i toni hanno un carattere militante della pratica crematoria in funzione anticlericale, massonica, radicale e anti fascista. La nostra bibliografia di riferimento al caso nazionale è soprattutto frutto della Fondazione Ariodante Fabbretti e ha un particolare focus sul periodo post-Risorgimentale dal 1880 al 1920.

Situated in the heart of Paris, France, Père-Lachaise is a magnificent monumental cemetery with more than two centuries of history. Every year 2.5 million people visit Père-Lachaise as if it was a big open air museum; every day hundreds of Parisians decide to go to Père-Lachaise for a walk, to meet other people and do open air activities. For many people who live in the same neighbourhood as the cemetery, it is a recognized place and a precious source of income. So, besides its principal function as a necropolis, the cemetery has become a unique and extremely complex place, where collective memory is connected to particular ideologies of resistance and transgression. It's a multifunctional space which allows and encourages practices and behaviors elsewhere unthinkable. For example, Père-Lachaise is one of the favourite places of eroticism in Paris. Transgression marks, in different forms and in a deep way, the daily life and perception of the world's most famous cemetery.

The TAPS Suicide Postvention ModelTM is a three-phase approach to suicide grief that offers a framework for survivors and providers in the aftermath of a suicide. This framework proposes guidance on how to build a foundation for an adaptive grief journey and creates a research-informed, proactive, intentional pathway to posttraumatic growth. The Model follows the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors' peer-based model of care and has supported more than 16,000 military suicide loss survivors over the past decade. The Model is applicable to anyone grieving a suicide loss or coping with any associated trauma.

Dealing with death and bereavement in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic will present significant challenges for at least the next three months. The current situation does not allow for families andbcommunities to be involved in the process of death in ways in which they would normally hope or expect to be. In addition, mortality rates will disproportionately affect vulnerable households. The government has identified the following communities as being at increased risk: single parent households; multi-generational Black and Minority Ethnic groups; men without degrees in lone households and/or in precarious work; small family business owners in their 50s; and elderlyhouseholds. Our study focused on these groups. This report presents a summary of findings and key recommendations by a team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics who conducted a public survey and 58 cross-community interviews between 3 and 9 April 2020. It explores ways to prepare these communities and...

The article proposes a hermeneutic approach to the films of M. Night Shyamalan based on a study of the convergence of three parallel processes: the detailed use of planning and, most of all, the shotcountershot, and the dialectic between field and out of field, the open construction of otherness; and, lastly, the narrative motif of the dead person who returns. The director manages to link those three aspects with a detailed investigation into the possibilities of the fantastic genre in order to metaphorically approach the problems of contemporary society and a new involvement of the viewer in the suspension of disbelief required by fiction.

One of the presuppositions of this paper is that is indeed possible to conceive of Bowies death as an ‘event’ that was staged, mediated and performed by means of the Blackstar-album, and more particularly, by the song Lazarus. To further support that claim, I situate the Bowie case within a scholarly discourse on the representation and framing(s) of death in contemporary Western societies. Following the work of the Danish sociologist Michael Hviid Jacobsen (2016), I argue that we can further interpret and conceptualize the death of David Bowie through the lens of what Jacobsen coined ‘Spectacular Death’, a term that designates a ‘’revival of interest in death, dying and bereavement’’, in which we ‘’see the rise of new rituals and the reappearance and reinvention of old ones in many ceremonial practices [and] media representations’’.  Central to these media representations is a globalized culture of digital media, which makes it increasingly difficult to draw any spatial or geographical boundaries whatsoever.

Heredero de toda una corriente desmitificadora que, desde el cine, se empleó en derribar simbólicamente la estatuda de un Caudillo muerto en su cama y que todavía descansa en la paz de su « mausoleo » del Valle de los Caídos, el famoso director de la compañía Els Joglars Albert Boadella se valió de la cámara para una ópera prima sobre la agonía y muerte de Franco irónicamente titulada ¡Buen viaje, Excelencia !. « Paliar una frustración », es la expresión que emplea para caracterizar su empresa, la frustración de una generación incapaz según él « de plantear una actitud lo suficientemente enérgica y eficaz como para precipitar el final del totalitarismo ». Lo que en otros tiempos fue el núcleo de un relato dramático que la propaganda oficial había plasmado en clave heroica se va a contar desde el género que más se aleja de las lágrimas : la comedia, una comedia esperpéntica, de un humor negro despiadado. El arma para figurar el evento, va a ser pues la risa. Estudiaremos la película ¡Buen viaje, Excelencia ! (Albert Boadella, 2003), insertándola en la genealogía de las películas sobre la muerte de Franco, y destacando la originalidad y la radicalidad de esta propuesta cinematográfica, viendo cómo el director se vale del género de la comedia para « paliar una frustración » generacional.

To date, the US military has made major strides in acknowledging and therapeutically addressing trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in service members and their families. However, given the nature of warfare and high rates of losses sustained by both military members (e.g., deaths of fellow unit members) and military families (e.g., loss of a young parent who served in the military), as well as the ongoing threat of loss that military families face during deployment, we propose that a similar focus on grief is also needed to properly understand and address many of the challenges encountered by bereaved service members, spouses, and children. In this article, we describe a newly developed theory of grief (multidimensional grief theory) and apply it to the task of exploring major features of military-related experiences during the phases of deployment, reintegration, and the aftermath of combat death—especially as they impact children. We also describe implications for designing preventive interventions during each phase and conclude with recommended avenues for future research. Primary aims are to illustrate: (1) the indispensable role of theory in guiding efforts to describe, explain, predict, prevent, and treat maladaptive grief in military service members, children, and families; (2) the relevance of multidimensional grief theory for addressing both losses due to physical death as well as losses brought about by extended physical separations to which military children and families are exposed during and after deployment; and (3) a focus on military-related grief as a much-needed complement to an already-established focus on military-related PTSD.

Keywords: Grief - Theory - Military - Family - Bereavement - Child - Adolescent - Parent - Combat

Książka w sposób kompleksowy prezentuje problematykę postawy wobec śmierci w cyklu życia człowieka. Zawiera, po pierwsze, pogłębione studium teoretyczne integrujące w obrębie modelu Erika Eriksona najważniejsze odkrycia konceptualne i empiryczne w zakresie psychologii śmierci. Po drugie, na bazie psychoterapeutycznych doświadczeń autora zilustrowane i omówione zostały problematyczne aspekty postawy wobec śmierci, charakterystyczne dla różnych faz cyklu życia. Po trzecie, prezentuje przeprowadzone przez autora badania korelacyjne nad psychospołecznymi uwarunkowaniami postawy wobec śmierci w okresach adolescencji oraz wczesnej, średniej i późnej dorosłości, a także nad różnicami w zakresie postawy tanatycznej w badanych fazach życia. Zawarte w książce studia teoretyczne i kliniczne oraz badania korelacyjne pozwoliły sformułować wnioski praktyczne odnoszące się do pomocy psychologicznej osobom w różnych okresach rozwoju oraz wyznaczyć kierunki przyszłych badań nad problematyką postawy wobec śmierci w biegu życia człowieka.         

„Książka jest rzetelna naukowo, bogata treściowo, ciekawa i dobrze napisana. Cechują ją wysokie walory poznawcze i aplikacyjne. Dostarcza wielu przesłanek do pracy podejmowanej przez psychologów i psychoterapeutów. (…) Dla wielu współczesnych śmierć – choć nieunikniona – stanowi temat tabu. Marcin Sękowski je przełamuje, przedstawiając profesjonalnie problem stosunku do śmierci i jego osobowe uwarunkowania”.
prof. dr. hab. Maria Ledzińska (Uniwersytet Warszawski)


„Monografia będzie przydatna wszystkim osobom zajmującym się problemami osób, które stykają się z kwestią śmierci. Może służyć studentom, badaczom i praktykom w dziedzinach nauk społecznych i nauk o życiu, a także osobom uczestniczącym w ruchu hospicyjnym. (…) Pokazana w książce perspektywa ujmowania postawy wobec śmierci w cyklu życia człowieka pozwala na lepsze zrozumienie nas samych w sytuacji granicznej”.
dr hab. Paweł Izdebski, prof. UKW (Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego w Bydgoszczy)

Marcin Sękowski – psycholog, psychoterapeuta, doktor nauk społecznych w zakresie psychologii, adiunkt w Instytucie Psychologii Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej w Warszawie. Jego zainteresowania naukowe obejmują przede wszystkim problematykę tanatologiczną, w tym zagadnienia postawy wobec śmierci, ryzyka samobójczego i żałoby. Publikował m.in. na łamach „Death Studies” i „Omega: Journal of Death and Dying”.

Grief is a family affair, yet it is commonly viewed as an individual phenomenon. As an international, interdisciplinary team, we explore grief within a family context across theoretical, research, practice, and educational domains. Families are complex and working with this complexity is challenging but necessary for a holistic view of grief. We therefore encourage an increased focus on theorizing, researching, practicing, and educating using innovative approaches to address the complexities of grief within the context of families. Learnings from within each domain will affirm and enhance the development of family-level thinking and approaches.

This chapter examines the politics of death space in Hong Kong. It explains the shrinkage of death time and space over the past few decades, and highlights the newest debates on the shortage of urn spaces for the interment of human cremains. In order to reduce the pressure on land resources for accommodating the dead, the government since the late 2000s has put in great efforts to promote sea burial, which requires no land space. Yet, Hong Kong Chinese, who still practice ancestral worship and carry on with the tradition of grave-sweeping, are yet to consider this as an appropriate way to handle ancestors' ashes. The chapter will provide a description of the major change in Hong Kong's death management since the mid-1950s and show how death space politics has been part of the overall land politics which evolves together with the uncertainty of Hong Kong's political future.

Cremation is a complex and variable fiery technology. Across the human past and present, fire has been variously deployed to transform the dead in a range of spatial and social contexts. Often operating together with other disposal methods, cremation has risen and fallen in popularity in association with many shifts in mortuary practice since the Stone Age (Cerezo-Román & Williams 2014;Williams et al. 2017).Yet ‘cre- mation’ is far more than just the fiery dissolution of the human cadaver: in the human past and present it is often part of a multi-staged mortuary process that can afford a range of distinctive spatial and material possibilities for the translation and curation of the ‘cremains’ or ‘ashes’ together with a range of other mate- rial cultures and substances. By rendering cadavers fragmented, shrunken, and distorted, burning bodies not only denies decomposition and speeds corpse transformation, it renders the dead portable and partible. In a range of subsequent post-cremation practices and beliefs, ‘ashes’ from pyres can be considered a versatile mnemonic and numinous substance which might be consigned to graves and tombs, but also readily strewn over land and water or integrated into above-ground architectures and portable material cultures. Hence, not only does cremation involve fiery transformation, it facilitates the creation of varied and distinctive landscapes of death and memory through the deposition and commemoration of the dead in which ashes facilitate remembering and forgetting through their presence and their staged absence.

The Bamiléké of Cameroon have long believed that after the corpses of their ancestors have rotted they can be exhumed and the skulls used to communicate with the spirits of the dead, as well as their godhead, to receive spiritual guidance. The religious rite, which has necromancy at its fulcrum, is of ancient origin and the Bamiléké have practiced it for thousands of years. Urbanisation has impinged upon the Skull Cult as it is forbidden to move ancestral skulls, which must at all times remain in the natal village of the deceased. Nevertheless, city-dwellers who are beset by misfortune may travel to the birth places of their ancestors to honour them and perform rites to propitiate them. However, although urbanisation has adversely affected the practice, it is the Catholic Church that has most infringed upon the Skull Cult. Due to pressure from the officiants of the local Catholic Church, which has labelled the skull cult 'barbaric' and even Satanic.